Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

3:30 PM, Friday, Jan 23, 2015
Room 155, Chem-Phys Building

Dr. Bartek Czech Stanford University

Space is Compression

The space we live in -- the space measured in miles,
kilometers and parsecs -- has an internal structure of its own.
Surprisingly, this structure is intimately related to quantum
information theory, a field at the intersection of physics and
computer science. To understand this connection, I exploit the
holographic duality: an alternative description of the world as a
gigantic hologram, which can be deduced from careful reasoning about
the physics of black holes. The final conclusion is that the fabric of
space encodes streaming compression protocols analogous to the one
used by Netflix. Consequences of this assertion range from condensed
matter physics to the most fundamental ways in which we conceptualize
space and time.